Can’t stop procrastinating? Try cognitive behaviour therapy

Ever find yourself doing just about any other task to avoid doing something more urgent or important? Cognitive behavioural therapy may help.

“Everybody procrastinates,” says Alexander Rozental at Stockholm University in Sweden. “It’s an everyday phenomenon. Usually it doesn’t cause more than annoyance and frustration.”

But people who regularly procrastinate often say it affects their lives, and can make them feel anxiety, guilt and shame. Putting off going to bed can, unsurprisingly, lead to not getting enough sleep. “And procrastination can affect your health if you put off exercise or going to the doctor,” says Rozental.

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Because procrastination isn’t recognised as a clinical disorder, there is no established treatment. Rozental and his colleagues have been exploring whether cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can help.

Procrastination points

CBT aims to change problematic behaviours and replace them with more useful ones. This has been shown to work for treating some mental health disorders, such as phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder, by teaching people how to control their breathing and deal with anxiety, for example.

To develop CBT for procrastination, Rozental’s team focused on behaviours like setting goals, removing distractions and rewarding successes. The team identified procrastinators by asking student volunteers to fill in a questionnaire that assigns people a procrastination score, on a scale of 1 to 60. The average person had a score of 30, so the team tried their CBT only on people with a score of 40 or higher.

Over eight weeks, the group tested two versions of CBT. A weekly, internet-based therapy was given to 48 participants, which provided them with reading materials, exercises to do and advice. Another group of 44 people received fortnightly in-person therapy sessions in groups of 12, led by a pair of therapists.

At the end of the experiment, all volunteers showed an improvement. “We saw large effects,” says Rozental. “Their scores dropped by around 10 points, and by the end of the treatment, 34 per cent had scores similar to the average population.”

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When the team used other questionnaires to assess whether these changes benefited aspects of the students’ wider lives, they found moderate improvements in their academic performance, feelings of anxiety, and well-being. “The results are promising,” says Rozental.

Six months later, the students who had received the group therapy had improved by a further four points, while those using the internet version slipped closer to their old ways. Rozental thinks group therapy may be more effective because it helps to hear from and support others who have had similar experiences.

Bruce Fernie at King’s College London thinks treatments for procrastination are a good idea, as long as they are given only to problematic procrastinators. Intentional procrastination is seen by some as useful – some people choose to delay tasks, because they think their performance will be better in the long run. It is the unintentional kind of procrastination that causes problems, says Fernie. “This can affect exam performance and interpersonal relationships. It is important to treat this type.”

Teenagers and people in their early twenties seem most likely to procrastinate, perhaps because the part of the brain involved in long-term planning doesn’t mature until our twenties. Rozental hopes that procrastination CBT could be offered by schools and universities, and the student health centre they used in their experiment has already decided to continue providing the therapy, he says.